


the heart closes like a nocturnal flower

by lotesse



Category: Merlin (BBC)
Genre: Angst, Character of Color, Multi, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-08-29
Updated: 2009-08-29
Packaged: 2017-10-02 14:57:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lotesse/pseuds/lotesse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The way the story ends - the way this story always has to end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the heart closes like a nocturnal flower

They cling together in the darkness of the nights - the orphaned boy and the suppressed woman alone together. Gwen bandages the hurts of Arthur's body, wounds gained in the battles that are springing up everywhere, rivers of violence breaking through the bulwark of the ordered hierarchies of feudalism. She tries and fails to salve the hurts of his heart. He does not know how to accept her comfort, motherless and abandoned always, hardened and made solitary by kingship.

Gwen wishes that she could become equally hard, hide her tendernesses behind a carapace. At night she dreams that Morgana has drowned herself in her solitary madness, cast herself into the sea beside her island. Gwen had helped her mistress to flee the court, when her visions had driven her to the brink of insanity and treason, slipping down into the dungeons to unlock Morgana's manacles. "Pretty witty Gwen," Morgana had whispered to her in a demented singsong, "did you know that I let your father free from these very walls? So long ago it was. They cut off his head." Her eyes had gone blank, and she said nothing else. Gwen isn't sure, sometimes, that she didn't die along the roadside that very night.

She dreams, and Arthur weeps. Silently, in the dark corners of their bed, early in the morning before the larks start singing, when the world is washed pale and mythlike in the half-light. He does not speak of Merlin, vanished Merlin, but she knows who he's mourning. She pulls him into her arms, sleepy-soft, and kisses his tangled, coarse hair. She feels sisterly, or motherly - she doesn't entirely know the difference, being herself the childless only child of a dead widower.

She does not burn for Arthur, and while he sometimes flames brightly in their shared bed, she cannot miss the ever-present distance in his eyes. When he is passionate, he is not making love to her. She wonders, sometimes, what Merlin looked like in the throes of sex - if he lay quietly as she does, or if he made love with Arthur's same fervor, fighting over again between the sheets the battles that raged between them in the public streets. She wonders if Merlin fights against whatever it is that holds him now, whatever fate stole him away from the side of the young king.

Everything is falling apart; the center will not hold. So Arthur says, low and tense, speaking his secret despair to her in the dark. But she knows better. The problem is that the center is no longer there. Merlin disappeared as if the very land had swallowed him, and somehow the defiant power that always used to allow him to tear past all obstacles to his king has not brought him back. And with him gone - the knights are restive, Lancelot's dark eyes flaming in the shadows, the Druids whispering in the corners. They are candles in the wind. She feels the night coming down.


End file.
